Climate warming may drive invasions by exotic plants, thereby raising concerns over the risks of invasive plants. However, little is known about how climate warming influences the growth and competitive ability of exotic plants from their home and introduced ranges. We conducted a common garden experiment with an invasive plant Centaurea maculosa and a native plant Poa pratensis, in which a mix...

1. Evaluating variation, or ‘conditionality’, in plant interactions is crucial to understanding their ecological importance and predicting where theymight be at play.Much is known about conditionality for competition, facilitation and herbivory, but not for allelopathy, which likely contributes to the equivocal nature of reports on this topic.Centaurea maculosa (spotted knapweed) is an invasive...

Spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe) occurs from Western Asia to Western Europe both as diploid and tetraploid cytotypes, predominantly in single-cytotype populations with higher frequency of diploid populations. Interestingly, only tetraploids have been recorded so far from its introduced range in North America where they became highly invasive. We performed phylogenetic and network analyses of...

Little is known about how exotics influence the ecophysiology of co-occurring native plants or how invader impact on plant physiology may be mediated by community diversity or resource levels. We measured the effect of the widespread invasive forb spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa) on leaf traits (leaf dry matter content, specific leaf area, leaf nitrogen percentage, leaf C:N ratios, and del...

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Niche-based models calibrated in the native range by relating species observations to climatic variables are commonly used to predict the potential spatial extent of species invasion. This climate matching approach relies on the assumption that invasive species conserve their climatic niche in the invaded ranges. We test this assumption by analysing the climatic niche spaces of Spotted Knapweed...